VARIETY PSYCHOLOGY

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

VARIETY PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is different: scientific, popular, everyday …

Recently, another type of psychology has appeared. I call it pop psychology.

Immediately, I want to outline the differences between popular and pop psychology.

This line is thin, but distinguishable. It is most noticeable at the target level. The goal of popular psychology is to popularize psychological knowledge, make it accessible, and form the psychological culture of the population.

The goal of pop psychology is to popularize the singer from psychology. Psychological information here acts as a means.

The first wave of pop psychology swept through the perestroika era. Its flagships were Kashpirovsky and Chumak. Those who lived at this time probably remember the television sessions, in which magical rituals were performed with charging water and mass programming the population for good luck. It was a time of crisis, a time of total destruction of the usual established picture of the world with the uncertainty of the future and, as a consequence, a huge amount of anxiety. During such periods, it becomes difficult for a person to rely on reality, and as a way of coping with anxiety, the magical picture of the world is activated. This peculiarity of the time was caught by the managers of pop psychology.

We are now witnessing the second wave of pop psychology. However, the situation has changed somewhat since then. First, the crisis has ceased to be acute, it has become chronic. And the anxiety also ceased to be acute. Secondly, in general, the level of the population's psychological culture has increased. These factors have influenced the nature of modern pop psychology: mass hypnosis sessions are no longer rolled out.

Today, pop psychology singers compose their songs full of positive promises, pop psychology masters arrange psychological tours, gather halls, organizing performances, where they generously share simple but effective psychological recipes for getting rid of all problems.

Their job is to impress. Attract attention. Form the need for mass consumption of psychological services. For this, a number of psychological techniques are used:

• Creation of an image of a guru;
• Promises to solve all problems;
• Providing simple answers to complex questions;
• Operating with banal knowledge as sacred truths;
• Shocking.

All this fits well with the following features of the psychology of a potential mass consumer:

• Failure to acknowledge the authorship of their problems - “we are not like that - life is like that”;
• Installation for a "miracle". Healing should happen quickly and with minimal costs - time, energy, material;
• Belief in authority - a wise and experienced person who "will solve all my problems."

Variety psychology is a modern social phenomenon, the result of marketing and advertising. It is sad that this phenomenon has affected psychology and especially psychotherapy, this area of social knowledge and practice, which itself is designed to reveal manipulation and falsehood in relationships and in life in general.